Who says anything "happened" to it? Presumably Starfleet eventually sent ships to help them out, and they're probably still out there. But they're far enough away that they're unlikely to come into play in Rise of the Federation.

Who says anything "happened" to it? Presumably Starfleet eventually sent ships to help them out, and they're probably still out there. But they're far enough away that they're unlikely to come into play in Rise of the Federation.

It's a YMMV thing. In this case I think its easier to just pretend a few things happened slightly differently in "Balance of Terror" rather than to twist the meaning in the exact words to better fit the other shows. Each to their own.

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Except that you're the one who's projecting a meaning into the BoT lines that simply is not there. The characters are not as completely dumbstruck by the very concept of invisibility as you claim. The exact words they speak make it clear that Starfleet understands the concept quite well and knows exactly how it could be done in theory, but simply never expected it to be made practical. So your interpretation is farther from the exact words than ours is.

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But Enterprise showed us is was practical and known to be by Starfleet, hence the discontinuity and this entire discussion.

But Enterprise showed us is was practical and known to be by Starfleet, hence the discontinuity and this entire discussion.

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Enterprise showed sensors that could see easily through 'practical' 22nd century cloaking technology. And this technology failed to defeat the sensors from the future for more than a century.

'Balance of terror' cloaking technology is nothing short of revolutionary in that it does defeat said sensors, after more than a century of failure to do so (it's comparable with the real-life invention of an efficient, commercially viable fusion reactor tomorrow, after 'only' 60 years of failures) - and the behavior of Kirk&co is fully consistent with this interpretation.

What you are trapped by, King Daniel, is '80-'90 fanfiction - you apparently internalized its interpretation of the relevant lines in 'Balance of terror' (that no one saw/had any form of cloaking tech previously).

In the end, you can't really treat TOS as absolute and nitpick ENT to death because of it, since neither TOS nor any other Trek series was absolutely consistent with its own self. No TV series ever is.

But Enterprise showed us is was practical and known to be by Starfleet, hence the discontinuity and this entire discussion.

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Asked and answered. There is no discontinuity if you accept that cloaking is a series of successive technologies rather than a single one. The stealth tech used in the 22nd century was penetrated using the tech that Archer got from Daniels in "Shockwave." Once those sensor protocols became standard on Starfleet vessels (and probably adopted by other species over time), that type of cloaking tech would've been rendered useless, and there would've been no point in using it at all anymore. The tech in "Balance of Terror" would therefore have to be a different, completely new form of stealth technology.

As I've said, this is simply common sense. This is how it works in real life: there is a constant arms race between stealth and its countermeasures, and when a new countermeasure is devised, it negates existing stealth technologies and requires the development of new ones. So it makes no sense at all to treat all forms of cloak as a single, unvarying technology -- especially given all the times we've seen cloaks penetrated in one era (e.g. TUC) and then seen viable, undetectable cloaks in use in a later era (e.g. TNG). They have to be different technologies.

Meanwhile, I've been cleared to announce that my next Trek novel will be a sequel to A Choice of Futures entitled Star Trek: Enterprise -- Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel. That's right -- the buzz for Book 1 has apparently been so strong that I've already been asked for Book 2 (indeed, I got the invitation about a week before I even turned in the manuscript for ACoF!). It's always been my hope that ACoF would be the first of a series, but for the past few months I've had to tiptoe around confirming that it now will be.

Tower of Babel will move the story of the Federation's early years forward into 2164, and the title offers a hint about its subject matter. I can't tease much about it yet, since there's a lot about Book 1 that hasn't even been publicized yet. But it will continue to develop the main story and character threads of Book 1 and will add some new ones, both following up on Enterprise and laying the groundwork for the world of The Original Series, and featuring more exploration of new worlds (at least, new to the characters, and not well-explored in canon or literature to date) than I managed to fit into Book 1. I don't yet know what its publication date will be, but considering that the manuscript due date is about seven and a half months after the previous one, I daresay it'll probably be sometime in early 2014.

Congratulations! This series sounded promising since you first announced it and now it sounds like TPTB agree and support that promise. Hope you do something special for yourself to celebrate.

On a sorta/kinda unrelated note, I read your analysis of Genesis II and Planet Earth on your blog yesterday (interesting article, BTW) and it made me want to watch these DVDs immediately. The marketing department for these discs owes you a royalty, sir, since I consequently ordered these two films from Amazon based entirely on your blog piece. Thanks.

Currently reading the first DTI book. Really enjoying it. Reading the e-book, that way I can keep the annotations for the book open on a web page and then change from the reader to the web page and look up the annotation. A big thank you to Christopher for all his efforts in assembling these annotations.